MOVING TOWARDS AN INTERNATIONAL TRAUMA AWARENESS DAY

Focus on Trauma Suffering, Trauma Treatments and Post-Traumatic Growth

Almost every day the international community recognizes an issue of significant concern, such as AIDS, disability, poverty, cancer and autism. Many are widely known—for example World AIDS Day on 1 December. There are even days focusing on mountains, toilets and jazz. Yet, surprisingly, there is no International Trauma Awareness Day. This is all the more curious since many of the issues addressed by the existing international days are related to trauma, although that is not explicitly stated.

There may be as many as 500 million people worldwide who suffer from trauma and trauma-based diseases and disorders and yet there is no day in the year when the world stops to consider the insidious individual, and far-reaching social, consequences of stress and trauma. The closest we come to that is World Mental Health Day on 10 October.

GIST-T seeks to increase awareness about trauma and the effective treatments that are now available by setting up a campaign to declare an International Trauma Awareness Day. We will be approaching many stakeholders and liaising with key organisations, including the UN, about the mechanics and logistics of doing so. As a way of supporting those efforts, we are planning on launching a social media campaign to mobilise public support, including on-line petitions, both in the UK and in other countries. We also plan to use our social media profile to disseminate information about the latest developments relating to the causes, symptoms and, crucially, the effective treatments of trauma, as well as to inform the public about how best to help people in the aftermath of an overwhelming event so as to minimize their chances of becoming traumatized. Our aim is that the social media framework supporting International Trauma Aware-ness Day will become a portal for public information about all aspects of trauma.

We believe our message is ultimately very positive. Trauma can be healed. Moreover, we also want to highlight—indeed celebrate—the fact that treatment of trauma can lead to significant personal, and even spiritual, growth. To this end, we hope to produce and publish a companion publication coinciding with the declaration of the International Trauma Awareness Day based on interviews with inspirational people who have managed to overcome trauma in ways that have restored their health and enabled them to live more fully and to connect more deeply with others. This is an important part of our campaign because, although we wish to highlight the devastating effects of unresolved trauma, we also want the message to be hopeful, which we very much believe it to be.

Over the next year we foresee a period of intensive lobbying of governments and UN delegates in favor of a UN resolution creating an International Trauma Awareness Day, perhaps as early as 20 September 2018. This date is significant as it precedes the International Day of Peace on 21 September. By choosing this date, we also wish to highlight the fact that trauma is the root cause of much of the violence and abusive behaviour in the world and therefore treatment of trauma should become an integral part of conflict resolution, civilian protection and peace building efforts. Ultimately, the message we wish to communicate through this campaign is that healing trauma is essential, not only because the health, wellbeing and future of our species depends upon it, but also because it provides us one of the best opportunities to realise our great potential as human beings.